The present trend in portable communications devices such as mobile telephones is to increasingly lightweight devices with increased talk-time between battery recharge cycles. Such developments require ever more efficient radio-frequency (RF) amplifiers to minimise power consumption. In cellular systems such as GSM, the modulation scheme is a constant amplitude scheme, also referred to as constant envelope modulation, which permits use of efficient non-linear amplifiers. However, recent types of communication system such as EDGE and UMTS use non-constant envelope modulation schemes. The drawback is that the amplification of non-constant envelope RF signals requires the use of linear power amplifiers, which are inherently less efficient. The lower power efficiency of linear amplifiers translates into higher power consumption and higher heat dissipation.
A variety of linearisation architectures and schemes exist, including fixed and adaptive pre-distortion, adaptive bias, envelope elimination and restoration, polar loop and cartesian loop transmitters. Details of such devices are shown in “Increasing Talk-Time with Efficient Linear PA's”, IEE Seminar on TETRA Market and Technology Developments, Mann S, Beach M, Warr P and McGeehan J, Institution of Electrical Engineers, 2000, which is incorporated herein by reference. However, many of these devices and techniques are unsuitable for battery operated portable devices such as mobile telephones, or are incapable of meeting current RF design standards, such as the TETRA linearity standard, ETSI publication ETS 300 396-2; “Trans-European Trunked Radio (TETRA);-Voice plus Data (V+D)—Part 2: Air Interface (AI)”; March 1996.
Envelope elimination and restoration (EER) transmitters separate envelope and phase information from an input modulated signal. The phase information is then passed through a power amplifier as a constant envelope signal, permitting the use of efficient, non-linear amplifiers, while the envelope signal is added to the power amplifier output. Such circuits suffer from the inherent problem that the phase and envelope information propagates through separate paths, which introduces different delays on the phase and envelope components before they are combined again at the output of the transmitter. This leads to distortion of the modulation.